Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Fodor and LePore vs. Brandomstein

Most of us are aware of Jerry Fodor's hostility to Wittgensteinian 'use' theories of meaning, so it is no surprise that he and Ernie LePore have launched a stinging attack on Brandom's inferentialist semantics in the May 2007 edition of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Whatever one makes of Fodor's views, he does have a knack for cogently and eloquently articulating some of the problems faced by advocates of a social conception of mind:

As far as we can tell, Brandom simply takes for granted that (what Searle calls) "original Intentionality" inheres in public languages, the intentionality of mental states being, in some sense, derived. This is an issue over which floods of tears have already been shed; we don't propose to revive it here except to stress one brief point: If original Intentionality inheres in public languages, it must be possible fully to describe the procedures by which a child obtains mastery of its first language without invoking the child's intentional states (including what he knows, believes, hypothesizes, observes, etc.). Brandom doesn't anywhere rise to this challenge, as far as we know. Nor, for that matter, does any other philosopher we've come across. (Wittgenstein suggests that first language learning is somehow a matter of "training"; but he says nothing intelligible about how training could lead to learning in a creature that doesn't already have a mind.) ... (p.684)

The problem outlined by Fodor and LePore is a variation on a basic theme that has long been a stumbling block for those who would like to incorporate Wittgensteinian ideas into a systematic theory: namely, how can we bridge the apparent gulf between mere habituation and genuine normativity?McDowell's notion of 'second nature' in Mind and World is a promising starting point, and in her anthology Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning Meredith Williams has written an excellent (though largely therapeutic) essay on role of 'training' in Wittgenstein. But I still feel that there is much work to be done. (Perhaps reading Making it Explicit might be a start - it's something I plan to do as soon as I get reliable access to a library again!!)

41 comments:

If you plan to read Brandom then you might want to start with Articulating Reasons which is less daunting than Making It Explicit, on account of size mainly, and yet provides a very good introduction to Brandom's inferentialism.

"...a stumbling block for those who would like to incorporate Wittgensteinian ideas into a systematic theory: namely, how can we bridge the apparent gulf between mere habituation and genuine normativity?"

I focus on your reduction of the issue at hand. While one might say with you that this is a stumbling point of anyone trying to systematize Wittgenstein, this seems more a stumbling point for anyone, anywhere, for I know of no originary explanation for this difference, under any theory.

Or is that you find that other theories do not share this problem, that this is particular to Wittgensteinian investigation? Classical Latin authors of rhetoric regarded this difference simply as the "ingenium" capacities of a person, their in-born genius, so to speak. It shows itself in how one is able to break rules, and not just merely following, and to do so productively. If anything, Wittgenstein taught us that there is not rule for how to follow a rule. If this is understood, even further, there is not rule for how to break rules either. Rather, there is just the experience of cohesion, and the experience of the expansion of a purview. Habituation simply does not involve the concrete awareness of this possibility, the intentional variation on theme. It does not include the possibility of saying, as I believe Rorty marks out the essential linguistic act, "Those look like an X, but they are really a Y". The content of such a form cannot be habituated.

What I believe keeps creativity (whose possibility is implicit "genuine normativity") afloat over and above habituation, is the cashed-out-payment of reading behaviors as rule breaking in a productive sense. When rules are broken productively, there is the pay off for seeing things along new vectors. Much as in the conditions which govern intentional attributions, "genuine normativity" is an attribution, and not something one does. One might very well discover that what you thought was "genuine normativity" (I would say creative normativity) suddenly was only parroted habituation. (A brilliant thought offered by an intellectual happens to just be a paraphrase of someone else.) The simpler and more modest attribution actually does the best work at getting out what is meaningful in that behavior. In the same way, actions assumed to be intentional, may prove to be merely body actions, by context. What Wittgenstein tells us, I think, is that no matter how much you systemify, you will find no "object" or even "process" to which such a difference corresponds. It is much like his treatment of "understands" in PI.

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By day I hack on various .NET-related projects, mainly compilers, at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. By night I dabble in the occult arts, namely post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. Blessed be those on graduate school admissions committees; they taketh away the sins of the world, and admitteth me into a top-50 philosophy PhD program.